The milestone came with February’s royalty payout, SoundExchange said in a statement on Monday (February 24). It comes less than a year after SoundExchange’s payouts passed the $11 billion mark in 2024. The non-profit also reported it had distributed $248.6 million to creators in Q4 2024, bringing gross distributions for 2024 to $1.05 billion, up 4.9% year over year.
Source: SoundExchange surpasses $12bn in distributions to artists and rightsholders to date
Today (February 25), Kobalt has launched a new publishing platform called KOSIGN aimed at emerging artists and songwriters. Kobalt estimates over $1 billion in publishing royalties goes uncollected every year. It says its new KOSIGN platform was built to help independent artists, songwriters, and producers collect their share of this uncollected publishing royalty pool.
According to Create, under the new deal, Pack Records (stylized “Pack.”) and its artists will gain access to CMG’s proprietary technology, global distribution, data-driven marketing insights, and monetization tools, which the companies say will provide “new growth opportunities while preserving [CMG artists’] creative independence.”
Source: $1bn-valued Create Music Group acquires catalog from Pack Records as companies form new JV
Earlier this month, Warner Bros. Discovery and Cutting Edge Group announced they were teaming up to launch a joint venture to generate more money from one of the original Hollywood studios’ catalog of 400,000 movie and television songs. This novel arrangement was inspired by WBD’s need to get more out of its most valuable assets as the rise of streaming shakes the fundamental economics underlying modern media businesses.
Source: How Cutting Edge’s Billion-Dollar Venture With Warner Bros. Discovery Will Work
It’s been nearly two weeks since Chinese AI app DeepSeek rocked the artificial intelligence world, shaking up not just the public market but also the confidence of a lot of VCs who’ve built up massive AI portfolios. But despite the panic last week, it‘s now starting to seem like nothing materially changed in the industry as money continues to pour in for AI — with the promise of even more.
Source: Eye On AI: After DeepSeek Hysteria, The AI World Is The Same As It Ever Was
As Wall Street parses its earnings beat and stagnate streaming subscriber growth, the company revises its spending expectation from $24 billion to $23 billion for produced and licensed content, as well as sports rights. “In terms of cost cutting, as a company, we’re focused constantly on identifying opportunities where we’re spending money perhaps less efficiently and looking for opportunities to do it more efficiently,” CFO Hugh Johnston told analysts.
Source: Disney Lowers Content Spending Estimate by $1B for This Year
The newspaper company said it spent $10.8 million on costs associated with generative artificial intelligence litigation in 2024, according to its quarterly earnings filing on Wednesday. The Times, buoyed by its 11 million-plus paid subscribers to its newspaper and suite of products, is one of the few journalistic entities that can afford to engage in yearslong litigation with Big Tech.
Source: The New York Times Has Spent $10.8M In Its Legal Battle With OpenAI So Far
In its full-year results for 2024 The New York Times Company reported ending the year with 10.8 million digital subscribers — an increase of 1.1 million compared with the end of 2023. Of those 10.8 million subscribers, 3.5 million (or 32%) subscribed only to either its Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products.
Source: Third of New York Times subscribers do not pay for its news product
YouTube, the internet’s biggest streaming video platform, delivered a healthy 13.8% increase in global ad revenue for the year-end 2024 quarter to surpass $10 billion for the first time. YouTube’s record Q4 ad sales of $10.473 billion topped Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimate of $10.23 billion. That’s just one piece of YouTube’s business, not including subscription revenue from services like YouTube TV or YouTube Premium
What kind of deals do entertainment and media giants need in the age of technology giants? It is a question that Hollywood management teams and Wall Street are constantly discussing and assessing. Management consulting firm Bain & Co., in a new research report, shares this guidance: “Own the consumer, own the intellectual property (IP), or own nothing.” In other words to compete in “a world of tech mega-platforms,” players will need “more cross-sector M&A and deals for IP.”
Source: Bain’s Advice for Hollywood This Year: Own IP or Own Nothing